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From 'green dream team' to B team

“These two over here, they’re going to be making sure that we’re investing in American energy, that we’re doing everything that we can to combat the threat of climate change, that we’re going to be creating jobs and economic opportunity in the first place,” Obama said Monday when he introduced his energy and environmental team.

One former senior George W. Bush administration official noted that the White House often has a different mind-set when it makes its second term energy and environment Cabinet picks. “The president is better served to have entrepreneurs/change agents as appointees in the first term but people who can execute/implement/respond to crisis in the second term,” the former staffer said.

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Sen. Rob Portman, U.S. trade representative and then director of the Office of Management and Budget during President George W. Bush’s second term, said Obama’s new picks to lead EPA, Energy and Interior have “some opportunity to make progress” during the next four years. “But,” the Ohio Republican added, “there is some baggage.”

Obama’s picks must deal with a White House clamp-down on agencies that, while not uncommon, has been a surprise in light of Obama’s criticism in the 2008 campaign of Bush for doing the same thing. Ahead of last year’s election, several EPA rules got bottlenecked at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. while Obama aides weighed in on nearly every high-profile DOE move during congressional investigations of Solyndra and other stimulus money winners.

The new Cabinet selections also won’t have a friend near the Oval Office like Browner, who left her job after the 2010 midterms and saw her team folded into the Domestic Policy Council. There’s also been no one added with the stature on green job issues of Jones, who has since gained fame as a CNN pundit.

It’s not all bad news for the Obama nominees, who have career-defining opportunities and the luxury of joining departments stocked with political and career aides.

“In a second term, there’s more opportunities,” said Bruce Babbitt, the former Clinton interior secretary who is calling on Obama to boost his conservation legacy in the second term, just as Clinton did with his.

“The president has more freedom,” Babbitt added. “The president has been liberated and presidents tend to think about legacy. And it provides more space for creative work and advancing ideas and programs.”

League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski was among the environmentalists quoted four years ago calling Obama’s first term cabinet a “green dream team.”

“We will surely miss the previous administration leaders,” he said Monday. “But with great new choices like Gina McCarthy, Sally Jewell and John Kerry, and a president even more vocal on climate change, the new Cabinet looks more and more like a new green dream team that has the opportunity to make historic progress on the biggest environmental challenge of our time.”

Several Republicans also said Obama could make second term progress via his Cabinet. Portman, for example, cited the negotiation of several trade agreements during Bush’s last four years in office.

“I think this can be an exciting time,” Portman said. “Yes, there’s some policy positions that have been set and you pick up certain decisions that have been established by your predecessor. But you’re also able to hit the ground running. The team’s in place.”

Dirk Kempthorne, who left the Idaho governor’s mansion to serve as interior secretary during the final 30 months of George W. Bush’s second term, said lame-duck status can be a motivator. “You know you are not at the beginning of things,” he said. “To put it in baseball terms, you are a closer.”

“In many respects, the second term is a time that if well planned and executed, a Cabinet member can be quite successful,” added Mike Leavitt, who joined the George W. Bush administration during the first term as EPA administrator and later switched jobs to be secretary of Health and Human Services.

Thanks to the divided Congress, Obama’s lame duck status leaves him working largely on energy and environment policy via his Cabinet agencies. It’s a situation similar to Clinton’s second term, when EPA had running room to regulate mercury pollution from power plants and to advance rules curbing diesel fuel and setting new arsenic levels for drinking water.

Fred Hansen, a former Clinton deputy EPA administrator, said the first term baggage during his tenure “didn’t seem quite so heavy” in the second term, as Republicans tried to do damage to the Democratic Party, rather than the lame-duck president.

“What I experienced … was a certain sense of freedom,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO. “It was an opportunity to realize some of the things that we had hoped for in the first term but couldn’t get.”

And for all the pageantry that came with their arrival, several sources noted that Obama’s first term Cabinet choices will be remembered more for the turmoil they dealt with. Said a former House Democratic leadership aide, “I don’t think the first term was that much fun for the Cabinet secretaries.”